Music breaking barriers

The Math-Rock House Band – The Math-Rock House Band

The Music

The Words

The only way I can make sense of this obscure new band’s name is as an act of protest against The Physics House Band’s overwhelming adoration amongst math rock fan groups. While I think they are pretty good, they aren’t really a math rock band. Enter The Math-Rock House Band and their self-titled debut. To add insult to injury, the Chicago band adopts a similar approach to the Brighton jazz rock trio, but put due emphasis on odd time signatures. Unfortunately, not all and everything is played in uneven timings, and they strike a tasteful equilibrium between mathematically-inclined measures and innumerate ones. So, it’s natural to be asking “Why have ‘Math-Rock’ in your name if you’re not even 100 % math?”

Well, I don’t know.

The first track, “March 99th” – that’d be June 7th, by the way –, and the first half of the album in general, are good and odd tunes that show how odd-metred music can be addictive and catchy, but they seem to forget that and lose their touch until the end of the release. This is a shame, really. It’s especially difficult to swallow coming from the literal “Math-Rock House Band”. It’s not to say that the latter songs are bad, but they certainly are less interesting and counterintuitive.

Obviously, you’re not held to your name, or I wouldn’t write about music, and Heavy Blog would release each post on a stone tablet, but their intent was clearly to make some math rock, as is evidenced by the “math rock” tag and the many actually-really-math songs on here. In my honest opinion, I think they should focus on the odd-timed songs that made the first moments of their album so appealing to me. But that’s just me. Everybody seems to have forgotten what math rock is about, and maybe I’m too old to adapt.